Class Actions: Getting Traction

Despite caution about creating a class action culture, recent case law has supported class or group actions as legal protections for consumers

In the United Kingdom, class or group actions have been relatively limited and very different from such actions in the United States. Recent case law has supported such actions as legal protec­tions for consumers, but this has been countered with caution about creating a class action culture, explains Laurence Winston, a partner in Crowell & Moring’s London office and co-head of the firm’s International Dispute Resolution Group.

Class actions generally fall into one of two categories: opt-in actions, which require claimants to actively join the lawsuit, and opt-out actions, in which one party can bring a claim for an entire class without having to gain the per­mission of, or even identify, individual members of that class, which naturally tends to lead to a much larger number of claimants in a case.

Read the complete article in the Litigation Forecast 2023.